CrawfordHollow wrote:probably order some Agar 35, maybe it will help me to relax and trust myself some.

Thanks,Troy

You probably don't need that. You probably just need to bring some consistency into your life-- that means waking, eating and sleeping at roughly the same times everyday, doing your practice during the same part of the day every day, and avoiding things that disturb the wind humour like cold drinks, the wrong foods, etc.

I have a schedule that varies from day to day and my days vary from week to week. I get one corporate weekend a month off, other than that I do know no what my days off will be. I sometimes work as early as 6 am, sometimes I don't work until 10 or 11 am, and somtimes I have to work the late shift until 10 pm. Sometimes I have to "clopen" (work until 9 or 10 at night and come right back in 8 hours later), in what can be a stressful environment, yet I keep it together and balanced. If I can do it, so can you Troy, my natural inclination is to wind disturbances. Right now I feel warm, and great. It just takes some practice. Purification of the elements helps quite a bit, on many levels.

Also, treat yourself right and don't hang around with the wrong people.

My work is also rather stressful and inconsistent. I don't know if you know anything about North Conway, NH but in the summer it is one of the biggest tourist traps out there. For the last empowerment I recieved I had to travel a couple hundred miles. I got back at four in the morning, was up for work 6:30 AM and worked until after midnight. Between two jobs right now I have been pulling in between fifty and sixty hours a week. I also own a house and a dog, so I've got a lot going on.

Luckily, that schedule isn't year round, but it takes a lot out of me. I actually do manage to stay fairly consitent with practice, because it is more importanct than anything. I definately get stressed, though. The problem with the drugs and the bad influences is that they're always there. In my current situation there really is no way to avoid being in bad company, so I have to be super careful. Eating well is also a challenge. I do work with food, but I rarely have the chance to eat meals, and they are far less healthy than they should be. I also have horrible insomnia. I take melatonin and sometimes valerian, which helps, but there have been times when I will stay up for two or three days (no drugs, mind you).

After I overdosed ten years ago I developed a very bad anxiety/panic disorder. I became so hyper-sensitive that anytime I left the house I would have a full on panic attack. I basically blew out my whole subtle energy system. Now they are mostly random, often I'll wake up in the middle of one. None of this has anything to do with samaya, but are all things that need to be worked with now that I have started practicing HYT and Dzogchen.

Like all of us I just want to make the most out of my life and practice. But I am also dealing with a situation where I have done extensive damage with drugs and could possibly do more. There was a time when I thought that just by being Buddhist that the problem would just dissappear, almost like it never happened. It seems like there is much more work ahead of me.

Troy, imo, the first priority in your life, aside from enlightenment, should be balancing the wind humour. And when that is done, by the way, the first priority will probably bare greater fruit, as will all the endeavors in other aspects of your life. The benefits will be ubiquitous. But you should really talk to Malcolm about it.

"All memories and thoughts are the union of emptiness and knowing, the Mind.Without attachment, self-liberating, like a snake in a knot.Through the qualities of meditating in that way,Mental obscurations are purified and the dharmakaya is attained."

Wear warming colors generally, such as yellow which is warming and grounding (earth element).

In addition there are many foods to adopt or avoid, and one should know what secondary elements are in ones make up so say for example, there is a lot of pitta in your constitution, you want to make sure you don't increase that while treating wind, and so on.

In terms of recovery from addiction, your slip is nothing unusual - although relapses are always to be taken very seriuosly for sure.

In the mid 90s a couple of friends of mine visited the Bön monastery in Dolanji, India. One day the abbott asked my friend what he did for a living, to which my friend replied "doing dishes at a resturant'. The abbott then gathered a big group of monks and told them 'this is a very good man, he has done lots of dishes to be here and learn'. Your story made me think pf this episode because I think you are a very good man. You have kicked a very hard habit, you are working very hard and still prioritizing and keeping up your practice. I think you are handling samsara better than most, and am inspired by your example.

Don't confuse sincere regret leading to increased responsibility, with ruminating and self-defeating guilt that erodes your self-esteem. The scheme in the four powers of Vajrasattva purification is sound psychology. Use your sense of regret to strengthen your resolve and fortify your practice, so that it is even more solid then before your practice. You have then created menaing out of your relapse, and transformed it into something good. I think you are doing better than you think.

Take a look at your own words in your first post. "No high is worth the pain that drugs can bring you". You still say this even having just gotten high days ago. This means that despite the fact that you had a lapse in judgement regarding drug use, you saw instantly that it was a pointless and samsaric activity. Therefore you didn't really relapse. You used a drug you had used in the past and it brought you little in the way of joy or delusion.

Your primary delusion when you were an addict was that this drug was so great, that it helped cure your pain, that it brought you joy. Now you know that was a lie, and you also know that your belief that it was a lie is true. What I mean by this is that sometimes the only way we really know if we've moved beyond something is to return to that thing and see how it affects us. This might not always be the smartest thing to do, but it can be a clarifying experience. It can allow us to see "I'm really beyond this now". So you can see it, you know it brings pain, you are upset you did it, it hasn't brought you joy, it didn't cure your suffering. You're beyond it now.